Teaching School Comms – 3 ways to engage your members & build your profile

At Glove we have been able to work with a number of Teaching School Associations, helping them and also their “parent” organisations – be that a MAT or a single school – understand that a successful TSA is all about engagement and communications.

Here are our top 3 things to consider when starting to build your TSA’s profile:

1.       Your Offer

Whilst TSA’s are all about collaboration – but there are a lot of you out there! So look for gaps in what is being offered in the “big ” and see where you and your TSA can fill a gap or even better still, bring something new and innovative to the market. Try and be unique and make your TSA distinctive by using the specialist expertise of your LLE’s, SLE’s and NLE’s to offer something new. And make sure you are keeping an eye on the horizon about what the “next big thing” in education CPD will be.

2.       Your Activity

What are you doing to get your offer, your brand and your impact out there? And are you engaging personally with your members? It takes a real communications mix to make sure you are present in peoples minds. Often, directors of teaching schools will say to us “no one is coming on our courses but we emailed our members about them” – and we say – “how many emails do YOU get a day? Why would a member school prioritise YOUR email over anything else?”. The comms mix needs to include: website content, printed & display collateral, social media (both institutional AND “personal”), events, networking, personal visits, email marketing, cross-selling and up-selling and blogs.

3.       Your Organisation

Lots of teaching schools and their parent organisations seem to think that they can become “successful” (what ever that means) with just one person – the director – doing pretty much everything. All the offer formulation, all the admin, all the DfE returns, all the SLE interviews, all the member engagement, all the marketing of the courses, all the finance and budgeting etc etc etc. Firstly – you have to decide on what “success” looks like, what is your “vision” – and what will it take to actually get there? And how can this then be made sustainable? Will you be able to physically have the time to engage?

To start to understand how to make your teaching school successful – points 1, 2 and 3 need to be addressed in concert.

 Then, you will have something to say, ways to say it and systems to keep on saying it.